The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise

It was a quiet Monday morning on the Upper West Side—birds chirped, a dog collar jingled, and a steady whoosh from the West Side Highway wove through the trees—as Hillel Schwartz, a soft-spoken man, age sixty-four, walked to Villa Julia, one of the last freestanding mansions on Riverside Drive. Red-brick, with white-marble trim, the mansion was a midwife attendant at the birth of the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. It’s a landmark in the history of noise.

Schwartz is a poet, a peripatetic cultural historian, and, most recently, the author of an enthusiastic, onomatopoeia-rich, nine-hundred-page tome called “Making Noise: From Babel to Big Bang and Beyond.” (“When people pull it out, I still can’t believe it’s nine hundred pages,” he said, “and that’s without the bibliography.” Three hundred and forty-nine additional pages of endnotes list his exhaustive scholarship, and another fifty-one-page bibliography examines noisiness in children’s books.) He lives in Encinitas, California, and arrived in Manhattan for the finale of the Guggenheim’s “Stillspotting NYC,” a two-year, multidisciplinary investigation into calmness and the “man-made environment.”

As he walked up Riverside, Schwartz laid out a brief history of the early days of anti-noise activism. In 1903, Isaac Rice and his wife and intellectual partner, Julia Barnett Rice—both accomplished musicians—sought to escape noisy Broadway. They built a four-story mansion on the tree-lined drive, then a place replete with coaches and foreign servants, and largely free from cars. Julia had a medical degree; Isaac, a venture capitalist, invested in things like air compressors, submarines, and the “pickled energy” that powered electric vehicles.

At the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Schwartz nearly stepped out in front of oncoming traffic. “We have extraordinary quiet cars. Electric cars are so quiet that they’re eerie,” he said. “But people hear cars differently. The clip-clop of a horse on a pavement is actually much louder than a car going at the same speed.”

Sound does not persist, neither across space nor across generations, so the tremendous rattle of horse-drawn drays, the clink of cupboards, the sneezes and shuffles of domestic life fall into the vacuous, silent crevices of history. “How did diners respond to the switch from pewter to china?” Schwartz wondered aloud. “How did a midwife register the sound of a new baby coming into the world? How did a person walking out in the woods register the sound of thunder or lighting?” In the course of nearly two decades of research, he had examined diaries, listened to wax cylinders, poured over digitized copies of the Brooklyn Eagle from 1901, and yet these subtle historical shifts in the soundscape eluded him. (“Even,” he said, “for a book of nine hundred pages, too intimidating.”)

Schwartz paused to imagine what sounds might have penetrated Villa Julia in 1905, might have bounced off its mahogany and marble, its hard plaster echoing, on a clear night. “There was a constant flotilla of barges taking construction detritus away from the city, toward the Jersey shore,” he said. “All of these Irish tugboat captains probably knew the service staff, and they would be signaling to them, ‘Hi, I’m coming by!’ But they would be signaling with these huge horns! And they would be signaling late at night, also, to their complement of workers, who were now on shore, drinking heavily in a nearby tavern: ‘O.K., time to call it quits!’ The number of horns recorded over the course of an evening amounted to thousands. I hesitate to call them toots. They were horn swarms.”

One day’s tally: one thousand one hundred and sixteen toots, a number that would triple in the fog. An electric fan by Julia Rice’s bedside did little to mask the penetrating, ever more powerful whistles.

If noise begat nausea (its etymological offspring), then a neurosis known as Newyorkitis enabled Julia Rice’s campaign. (Newyorkitis, a 1901 book explained, was a contagion affecting a large percentage of the inhabitants of Manhattan Island; the illness arose from an unhealthy addiction to noisy environs.) Rice argued that the city’s poor, particularly the insane and the sick, confined in public hospitals along the East River, on Randall’s and Blackwell’s islands, suffered miserably on account of tugboat noise. (Had Rice fought because of her supposedly quiet neighborhood and her own sleepless nights, Schwartz said, she would have run the risk of being cast as a thin-skinned, haughty, liberal, anti-Catholic bourgeoisie.) She waged a national campaign for a local issue and won: in 1907, Congress signed a law quieting the whistles of ships in federal waters. That same year, she hosted the first meeting of the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, in the library of her mansion, where the guests listened, with grimaces, to a graphophone recording of shrieks from the El, the honks of automobiles, and discordant street cries. These were examples of the unnecessary noise that needed to be silenced.

Before Schwartz left the mansion, he made one last stop, near the coach entrance, on 89th Street. He pointed to a stone relief in the porte-cochère with six figures. “Can you see? They had six children.” Dolly, Polly, Tommy, Molly, Lolly, and Babe were, in the words of the New York Sun, the “children who never hear don’t.” The Rice children played music. They kept a menagerie of cats and dogs. They ran around a gymnasium on the fourth floor. “They were still so noisy, ” Schwartz said, “that Isaac Rice had a vault built in the basement, which was not just impervious to sound but to vibrations, so his chess pieces would not be disturbed when he was concentrating on a game.” The temple of quietude had only been so quiet.

The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise would have one lasting accomplishment: quiet zones, first established around hospitals, and then around schools. The concept of zoning eventually paved the way for public parks as oases of tranquility. Outside, though, in the present, the noise persisted: helicopters whirred overhead, subways rumbled, and HVAC systems rattled our bones. “It’s quieter here, compared to other parts of New York City,” Schwartz said, “but not quieter than it would have been.” Heading back to Broadway, Schwartz admitted that he was not impervious to noise: he plugged his ears at the squeal of the subway and cannot tolerate a restaurant too loud to converse without shouting. Yet, for all of his research, he discovered only one noise that is universally intolerable: the gride, the rasping sound epitomized by nails on a chalkboard. “You can get accustomed to it,” he said, “but all human beings have their hackles raised when they hear that. Everyone.”

Illustration by Arnold Roth

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.